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0 pointsncmncm7y ago0 comments

Transmission losses are not negligible, so power generation generally needs to be near people.

If the power could be used to create and concentrate ammonia, much of needed generation could be shifted to farms. Of course farms have other uses for sunlight, so wind is a better choice there.

Generating ammonia with wind power eliminates the problem of intermittent availability. You only produce ammonia when there is power for it.

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inflatableDodo7y ago

Making your transmission line a lot longer doesn't scale your losses by that much surprisingly. The main transmission losses are at the conversion points and in the utility voltage cabling at the end, having long distance interconnects really only loses a percent or two over having short ones.

mrpopo7y ago

That's just a very naive simplification of a huge branch of electrical engineering.

To have low power losses in long distances, you use high voltage. The higher the voltage, the bigger (and more expensive) the "conversion points" need to be. Power losses will also be bigger.

To simplify greatly, having low-loss transmission lines costs more money, more equipment, more investment, more time. That's why it makes more sense to build the power source closer instead.

inflatableDodo7y ago

>That's just a very naive simplification of a huge branch of electrical engineering.

Anything I am going to squeeze into a comment on hacker news regarding the subject is likely to be. So are you against the concept of continent wide grids and transmitting power long distance from sparsely populated equatorial desert regions to the more populous temperate ones?

Faark7y ago

Your objection has merit, but this discussion seems to be focused on "what should we do going forward". While we currently suck at good & economical long distance transmission, this hardly seems to be based on physical limitations. Thus, if it is a worthy goal, we can & should guide our economies towards mastering that tech and driving prices down, kind of like we did with e.g. solar panels.

I'm especially eager to hear more about developments in / experiences with UHV DC lines, like in this ieee.org article + discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19295838

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inflatableDodo7y ago

mrpopo7y ago

That's just a very naive simplification of a huge branch of electrical engineering.

To have low power losses in long distances, you use high voltage. The higher the voltage, the bigger (and more expensive) the "conversion points" need to be. Power losses will also be bigger.

To simplify greatly, having low-loss transmission lines costs more money, more equipment, more investment, more time. That's why it makes more sense to build the power source closer instead.

inflatableDodo7y ago

>That's just a very naive simplification of a huge branch of electrical engineering.

Faark7y ago

I'm especially eager to hear more about developments in / experiences with UHV DC lines, like in this ieee.org article + discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19295838

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